Abstract
Nahajec’s monograph Negation, expectation and ideology in written texts: A textual and communicative perspective contributes to discourse studies by showing how stylistic analysis can be used to account for the role of negation in discourse and its potential ideological effects.
The book contains eight chapters. Chapter 1 defines Nahajec’s approach to negation and situates her study against the background of previous stylistic research from the perspectives of Text World Theory, polyphony and ideology. Her approach combines the cognitive concept of negation, as the conceptual practice of recognizing and expressing an absence, together with a pragmatic approach to negation based on its presuppositional nature, its variety in form and its ability to generate implicatures.
Chapter 2 provides a knowledgeable overview of psycholinguistic and linguistic research on the cognitive properties of negation, and admirably illustrates the complexities of this linguistic feature. Three main issues are foregrounded regarding the cognitive dimension of negation: it expresses absence that is perceptually prominent, it creates multiple spaces and it is intersubjective rather than subjective.
Chapter 3 discusses the linguistic realizations of negation and the topics of scope and force. It presents a typology of the range of expressions that can function as negators or ‘textual vehicles’ for negation, ranging from explicit to peripheral forms (analytic, synthetic, morphological, semantic and pragmatic negation) including past conditionals and modal verbs. It draws from negation types found in grammars and monographs on negation and makes them more readily available to discourse scholars.
In Chapter 4 Nahajec proposes a convincing pragmatic approach to the understanding of negation in discourse which brings together the concepts of presupposition, expectation and implicature. Her argument takes as a point of departure the well-known idea that when using negation, speakers evoke the corresponding positive term (presupposition) and they generate expectations in readers regarding socio-cultural behaviour. When uttered in context, negative utterances create additional pragmatic meanings (implicatures) which may have ideological effects. The model is applied to the analysis of various utterances, including imperatives, a less studied negative form.
Chapter 5 addresses the relations between negation and ideology by drawing from (somewhat outdated) research in Systemic Functional Linguistics and stylistics. The author explains that, when using negation, speakers access cognitive schemata which, when activated in the common ground, reinforce or challenge systems of beliefs, thus contributing to either perpetuating or challenging social stereotypes and behaviours. Real discourse examples from advertising and politics are discussed in detail and provide an attractive account of how ideological effects are generated and how they may vary depending on the type of negation.
Chapters 6 and 7 apply the previously presented approach to negation to the analysis of advertising and newspaper discourse. In Chapter 6, Nahajec focuses on how advertisements effectively use negation to problematize social issues which provide ‘an impetus to buy’ (p. 163). She illustrates how advertising discourse not only reinforces existing ideologies regarding body image, gender and age but often constructs apparently unnecessary needs in consumers. Chapter 7 presents a corpus study of 62 newspaper articles on the 2008 London mayoral election from 18 British and Irish newspapers. The study shows the frequency of negation types across topics and candidates (Boris Johnson, Ken Livingston, Brian Paddick). Results show that analytic negation is the most frequent type but other types of negation also play a role in the realization of absence. The analysis shows that by negating attributes of the candidates, expectations are created regarding what mayoral candidates should be like and an evaluation is carried out of the candidates’ competence.
Although Nahajec’s monograph offers valuable insights regarding the cognitive and pragmatic properties of negation, the study has two limitations. First, the situation of her contribution in relation to previous works on negation in discourse and on ideology is unfortunately incomplete and outdated at times. The author addresses previous research within literary stylistics but neglects more recent discursive approaches to negation in non-literary discourse, including the application of Text World Theory to advertising and newspaper discourse and the study of negation, intersubjectivity and stance in various discursive genres. This affects the way the intersubjective dimension of negation is addressed from a theoretical perspective in Chapter 2 and in the application to the analysis of advertising and political discourse in Chapters 6 and 7. In these chapters the analysis of intersubjectivity is limited to the expectations of ideal readers – a perspective that is more adequate for literary discourse – rather than the full complexity of how real audiences and voices are intertextually managed in discourse and how relations of alignment and disalignment are created.
The second limitation is the lack of clarity regarding the description of the relation between conceptual categories (absence and presence) and grammatical categories (negation, reference, scope, ellipsis). This complex relation is at times not explained in sufficient depth or with the required rigour. A part of the problem lies in the assumption that, because syntactic and lexical negation can both evoke an absence, there is an expectation that these forms will work in similar ways in discourse. While the claim that both syntactic and lexical negation evoke an absence is important, a rigorous distinction between the two types of negation is necessary in order to understand why lexical negation is not involved in grammatical processes such as ellipsis, or why the intertextual processes that syntactic and lexical negation create in discourse are different.
All in all, while the book is a welcome contribution to the study of negation from a cognitive-pragmatic perspective in advertising and newspaper discourse, the more problematic issues in the discussion of theoretical concepts point at the need for further research to advance the study of this complex linguistic topic.